Monday, January 24, 2005

The inaugural

With a brief glance at the obvious fact that this is a canned, off-the-shelf, spam-quality speech, "freedom" seems to be the main topic and motivator here. I would guess that when Bush talked about the importance of helping your neighbor, caring for the weak and deprived, he was suggesting that the government has no place there, but when he talked about the society having standards, he's talking about who you have sex with, what you smoke and drink, and what you read and watch, and that's something that the government would like to get involved with. Freedom from government help for the poor, freedom from activities the government doesn't like. Freedom from free thinkers, and free prison cells for free livers.

And don't forget to point out to your Libertarian and Anarchist friends the stern pointer toward the importance of "the rule of law."

Numbers:

free 34 [6]
freedom 27
liberty 15
---------
76 [now I get 48. Still not in agreement with others, but I'm not doing a hand count.]

76/2086 [48/2086]

3.6% or 1 in 27 words. [2.3% or 1 in 43 words.]

reason 0
rationality 0
responsibility 0
accountability 0
community 0
history 7
faith 2
god 3
heaven 1
destiny 1
equal 1
equality 0
war 7
peace 2

[Update: I used the word "free" in my search with TextWiz instead of the word "free " and so resulted in a higher tally. The correct number of free/freedom/liberty references is less than fifty.]




1 Comments:

At 10:44 PM, Blogger J Michael said...

I used TextWiz to count the instances of words, and having not read the fine print, I may have counted all the frees in freedom with all the frees without freedom, and resulted in a larger number of frees than Mr. Safire, qv. supra, mea culpa, and thank goodness I'm not a neurosurgeon once again. Much rejoicing and whatnot.

 

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